Death of a Nobody
Originally posted: 17 June 2010
Content: No Pairings, Death/Tomato Surprise
Mr. Gecinre Nodentcrips repressed a sigh as he looked at the open grave the pallbearers were lowering a coffin into. As a minor official, part of his portfolio was the duty of being present at paupers' funerals.
How many of these had he been at already? Gecinre had not kept track after the tenth, but he estimated that he was nearing the 50-mark. Although Mid-Childa liked to present itself as a picture of prosperity, it was an inconvenient truth that it still had a small share of homeless bums/tramps despite the various welfare initiatives put in place to try and solve the problem. Not known to or unclaimed by family when they passed on as all inevitably would, it fell on the state to provide them with a final resting place. This was an entitlement also extended to those who died anonymously.
Gecinre did not struggle to maintain a neutral expression, but let a few tears escape him. It never got any easier to attend these funerals, even though he had been to so many and had never known any of the deceased personally. He knew his friends called him a bleeding heart sometimes and it was not a description he attempted to deny. No one should have to die alone, unmourned, unremembered except as an impersonal part of the Ministry of Home Affairs' records, to be filed away and forgotten by the bureaucratic monolith.
Gecinre remembered that the state coroner had taken particular interest in this case. When the body had come in, discovered by a good citizen in some alleyway, it had just two knife wounds. One had gone through the spinal cord, ensuring paralysis, while the other, slightly newer one started at the bottom of the head, between the jawbone and Adam's Apple and went up into the brain. It appeared that the first wound had been left to bleed out for a while before the second had been delivered. The precision of the murder spoke of a professionalism that had the police worried, but the victim's body had already been left to rot some days before its discovery and no leads could be found. As a result, despite the regrets of all involved in the investigation, the murder had been cold-cased. The funeral arrangements were simple and inelegant; a washing and dressing of the dead man, short last rites by a representative of the Belkan Saint Church, a mass-produced coffin. Fortunately, there was more than enough left to learn the victim's identity through the government records.
After the gravedigger finished shovelling earth to fill the grave and smoothing out the earth over the coffin, Gecinre reverentially dropped to his knees to leave a white chrysanthemum on the grave. The gesture was not officially funded by the government, but he felt that the deceased deserved at least that much and had contributed one to all whose funeral rites he had witnessed. After he stood back up, he touched his fingers to his right brow and held the half-salute for a few seconds before backing away and turning to leave the cemetery grounds.
Behind him, the simple tombstone read "Yuuno Scrya".
=Damn-section-splitting=
A/N: Gecinre's name is an anagram. I hope you can solve it!
I know we do not see much of the TSAB's full machinations, but I ran on the assumption that it, like many other RL governments, would have such a service.
Extra notes, including the solution to the anagram, can be found in the AnimeSuki thread, posts 3095415 and 3097775.
